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Sunday, December 11, 2011

My trip to Cape Town is suddenly on my radar. I leave in ten days. Something blackhole-ish happened to this year and I have a twinge of whiplash. Where did it go? I need more time! Does this phenomenon just get worse as you grow older? When you're seven a year is a major slice of your age - when you are...cough-cough-we-have-a-bad-connection-squee-shhhhh ....that year has decreased incrementally in relation to all those stacked up against it. Is that it?

There will be some new things to do in the Cape. I intend mushrooming a bit more seriously than before, now that I know that summer-fruiting chickens of the woods can be found. I hope to join Helen's group of walking friends: without Vince I don't want to hike on my own. And not having him there will be a big, big sadness. But! My intrepid friend Ellen spontaneously booked a ticket to Cape Town at the end of last week, and will join me for ten days, staying in Constantia with us. That will be a lot of fun: a fellow plant and flower geek, forager, cook, and eater of lambs. I am very touched that she has the faith to fly so far, to see the land that I love.

I am hoping for a blogging friends lunch under the tree - the Voer bloggers will be in town from Pretoria and Southampton, respectively, there is Karen of Smashing Cape Town to meet, I hope The Sourcerer's Lily will be back from Turkey, and perhaps the Green Lima Beans can be pried out of Noordhoek...

If the dicey Internet connection in my parents' house holds its own I will of course post from down south. Constantia seems to reside in a kind of cyber Bermuda triangle. Connectivity comes and goes.

Enough of that. Here are some Cape Town and environs (Hermanus, Stanford, Walker Bay) pictures from our last trip. I'm having issues with Picasa - I used to like it but as a slideshow but it's just not as viewer friendly as Flickr. So here's Flickr.

Anyone else want to come? There are tickets in the realm of $1,000. Not bad for 16,000 miles, round trip. The extra bed is taken but we do have a nice tent...

Speaking of South Africa…. Maybe asking a South African this gets an eye-roll in response, but since you are the only South African I know I have to ask you. Do you have a good recipe for Bobotie? My husband just loves it and I have never tried to make it. Any advice?

South Africa is on our radar but we are just back from honeymoon in Cuba and have some fiscal recovery to do for a while. Someday, hopefully soon…

Mmm, already mid-Dec and the mall was in full Christmas frenzy yesterday - also don't know what the hell happened to the year, although it seems to have been hard work for all, which does make time disappear...

Thanks for the potential invite - would be lovely to meet you and Lily. We're disappearing to Joburg from 19th-26th Dec but otherwise taking our well-earned break here.

You are heading south while I am heading north. Enjoy Cape Town but we are having a very curious summer, so no, don't pack a whole load of winter woolies, but do bring at least one item on the warmer side.

In House Blogs

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Reasons to Dogear a Page

We have art, Nietzsche said, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

How will we know it's us without our past?

...How'll it be not to know what land's outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know - and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can't. The willow tree is you.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

Necessity knows no magic formulae - they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assissi's shoulders.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood. "Yes, it is certified now."

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

The garden paths were lit by coloured lamps, as is the custom in Italy, and the supper table was laden with candles and flowers, as is the custom in all countries where they understand how to dress a table, which when properly done is the rarest of all luxuries.

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

(Mrs Cadwallader to Dorothea)

"I know it's a great temptation to go mad, but don't go in for it, you wouldn't like it."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

"A is for dining Alone...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my ever-increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an act that should not be indulged in lightly."

MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran with them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Richard Chaston (1620-1695). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?